On Halloween evening in 1946, Spokane children were dressing warmly to go out and do their trick-or-treating. An early winter storm was headed their way.
That same afternoon, Rudolph Lonza took off from the runway of the Helena, Montana airport in his single-engine airplane. His destination was the Spokane Airport which was located at Felts Field in those days. The weather was bad in Montana but the storm got worse as he approached Spokane.
Lonza was an Army Air Corps flight instructor during World War II and a skilled pilot. That night he was flying his own AT-6 which he had purchased from the U.S. government after the war was over.
When World War II ended, lots of G.I.s returned to Spokane. Jobs were becoming available but housing and automobiles were tough to come by.
The big automakers like General Motors and Ford were transforming their productions lines from tanks and jeeps back to automobiles. New cars were scarce. Automobiles had not been built in any significant numbers during the war years.
Anyone who wanted to purchase a brand new car back then, had to put their name on a waiting list with a new car dealer. A new-car buyer could wait for months for delivery in Spokane. Those waiting lists were often influenced by under-the-radar considerations like your familial relationship to the car salesman or “up-front” money.
When Rudolph Lonza came home from World War II, he saw a need and jumped into the used car business. He started selling cars out of his mother’s front yard in north Spokane. In a short time his new business became too big for the front yard and he moved to operating a high volume used-automobile dealership located at Broadway and Monroe near the Spokane County Court House.
Rudolph Lonza become the “King” of used car salesman in the Spokane area and built up his reputation using the moniker “Crazy Trader Lonza”. He was a local version of Cal Worthington “GO SEE CAL” whose car lots still operate on the west coast of the United States.
“The Crazy Trader” and his brother George, had flown to Helena, Montana on that Halloween day to buy used cars to add to the inventory at The Crazy Trader’s lot in Spokane. Brother George drove one of the cars back to Spokane. Rudolph crawled back into the cockpit his airplane and set out for home (Spokane) just as bad weather was settling in.
Pilot Lonza steered his plane over the Bitterroot Mountains, then hit the heaviest part of the storm at Mullan Pass, near Coeur D’Alene Lake. He finally passed over the Washington-Idaho state line. He was attempting to line himself up for an approach to Felts Field when Mt. Spokane got in his way.
Wreckage calculations showed that Lonza was flying 600 feet too low in the heavy snow storm. He smashed into Mount Spokane at the 3,500 foot level on the south-east side of the mountain. The experts’ consensus ruled the cause of the crash was heavy icing on the plane. Lonza still had fuel. Although one tank was found empty, the other tank’s gauge read 30 gallons. Both wings of the airplane were clipped off by the trees on the way down, however the fuselage remained pretty much intact when it finally hit the ground in a heavily wooded part of Mount Spokane. Apparently Trader Lonza did not survive the crash.
No one saw the plane go down or knew where to look. And it was snowing. Searches were centered in the western Montana area although records later showed that Lonza had communicated with the Coeur d’Alene airport tower on that snowy night. Lots of people looked for the wreckage and its pilot from both ground and air. Rudolph Lonza’s brother, George, remarked “there are a lot of deep canyons between Helena and Spokane.”
Rudolph’s wife, Mary Lonza, offered a $10,000 reward for anyone finding him alive and $1,000 for finding his body and the wreckage before January 1. That was real money in 1946.
A rumor circulated among the searchers and Spokane townsfolk, that The Crazy Trader had a bundle of cash on his person when his plane went down. The money was for purchasing used cars.
Calvin Hudlow, 85, who has lived all his life up near the Mount Spokane crash site reported that “Lonza had a large amount of cash, $7,000 to $10,000 according to the papers.” Hudlow added, “The Crazy Trader wore an expensive diamond ring. There are local theories but no proof as to what may have happened to the cash or the diamond ring,”
Searches went on and on. Day after day. Months passed without finding the wreckage, searches for The Crazy Trader dwindled down to a few, mostly done by his family.
Then one afternoon more than a year after the crash, Max Mather Sr., who operated a dry-cleaners in Spokane, was hunting with his son on the eastern side of Mount Spokane. They spotted Rudolph Lonza’s leather flying-jacket and his suspenders lying out in the open, apparently left there by bears or coyotes. The hunters searched the area and found the airplane wreckage, nosed onto the ground under a canopy of trees.
Max Mather Sr. returned to his Spokane home and called the Sheriff to report their discovery. The Sheriff insisted that Mather take him back up on the mountain that night to show the location of the crash site.
Rudolph Lonza’s bones were spread around the area of the airplane. Apparently forest creatures had heard about the crash before humans.
A funeral was finally held for the pilot who left behind a young wife and two sons, Gary and Gregory.
The chapter was closed on Spokane’s famed Crazy Trader. Spokane would never see another used car salesman in the league of Rudolph Lonza.
However, the matter did not end there for Max Mather. He was the hunter who had stumbled upon the crash site and reported it to the Sheriff.
Max has since died but I spoke with Robert Max Mather Jr., his son. Max Jr. said his father complained that the F.B.I. grilled him at the time of his discovery. They kept him under observation for the next ten years, suspecting that he had pocketed the ring and the rumored thousands of dollars that Crazy Trader Lonza supposedly carried with him in the airplane that night.
Maybe the F.B.I. should have questioned the coyotes or the bears about the money. And any forest creature wearing an expensive diamond ring.
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